


Too Bad I'm a Loser

by slashersivi



Series: The Theban Band [1]
Category: The Losers - All Media Types
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha/Omega, Gender Issues, M/M, Military Backstory, Military Training, Omega Verse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-19
Updated: 2014-02-19
Packaged: 2018-01-13 01:24:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1207624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slashersivi/pseuds/slashersivi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jake Jensen isn't ashamed of being an omega, he's just fed up with the bullshit. </p><p>(wow I'm bad at summaries)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Too Bad I'm a Loser

**Author's Note:**

> Hrrmmm so I'm not really a writer but I got bit by this bug?? I wanted to explore an ABO verse where gender is alpha, beta, or omega, omegas having similar roadblocks/civil rights issues as women, and also where I could have the Losers (eventually) be part of an Army unit modeled after the Sacred Band of Thebes. There I guess I should have made that my summary but meehhhhhh.
> 
> Title from the BNL song "Falling for the First Time" because I couldn't resist and also I am not good at making up titles. :x Jensen's sister's name borrowed from jujitsuelf. Other elements from other epic losers fanfiction will probably appear too.
> 
> See end notes for military rank/lingo primer (will probably be added to as I write). Though y'all probably already know most of them and I try to write out acronyms before I use them if it doesn't sound too awkward.

The U.S. Army, despite having a certain reputation - always a decade behind when it came to equipment, lead by surly old brass and rife with sexual harassment that went largely ignored – was surprisingly progressive when it came to gender equality. It had begun allowing omegas to serve in its ranks, in limited capacities, starting in World War I, a time when the larger society still treated omegas as second-class citizens. Promotion was rare at first, but eventually omegas could be found at all levels in the chain of command, though an omega could only join the infantry or other combat specialties if accompanied by their bonded alpha. These pairs were assigned to a segregated division that became famous and highly decorated for acts of valor during the second World War. Newspapers hailed them as “the new Theban Band,” after the Sacred Band of Thebes of ancient Greece, and the name stuck. 

As the nature of warfare changed, the Band was reorganized from one large division to an elite unit under the umbrella of SpecOps, broken into smaller teams of two bonded pairs with an alpha CO and beta XO, for the sake of stability and keeping split-second calls in the field impartial. They were referred to simply as “Thebes” by other soldiers, in tones ranging from reverent to derisive, depending on the political leaning of the speaker, though most grunts had no real idea of what the Band actually did. 

It wasn't until the advent of Deprogest, the first drug that simultaneously prevented an omega from going into heat as well as suppressing their natural pheromone production, that unbonded omegas were permitted into combat ranks (conditional upon remaining on the medication for periods of extended training and deployments). With that final barrier removed, it could be said omegas achieved equality in the Army, according to the uniform code of military justice, anyway - years before the passage of anti-discrimination laws for employment in the civil sector. The opportunities for career advancement and educational funding, along with the prospect of free Deprogest, resulted in a boom of voluntary omega enlistment, even as America became embroiled in Vietnam and the government exempted omegas from the draft. Although Vietnam wasn't exactly a shining moment in the history of the U.S. or its military, it provided incontrovertible evidence that omegas didn't need an alpha to be a good soldier on the battlefield. 

Omega Rights organizations were divided over Deprogest, some calling it liberation from the chains of biology and others bemoaning a society where a fourth of the population had to barrage their body with chemicals and hide a part of their identity in order to be afforded the same respect as the rest of the population. Conservative groups condemned it across the board, calling it a subversion of the natural order or, in the case of those professing their “concern” for omega well-being, potentially unsafe or even lethal (though there was no evidence to suggest this, other than the typical rare side-effects that go along with any drug). The biggest controversy about the drug, however, was that it also prevented bond formation. Omegas in favor of the drug dismissed this as an issue since normal heats and hormone production would typically resume within three months of stopping the drug (though could take as long as a year in some cases). The Catholic Church and multiple other religious institutions named it an abomination in the eyes of God.

Jake Jensen was of the opinion that, assuming there even was a God, he probably didn't actually give a shit about what people did, if human history was any indication. Deprogest (or the offbrand equivalent) had been a blessing for him. It wasn't approved for use by adolescents so, like most omegas, Jake had been bullied after presenting, and sexually harassed once he miraculously emerged from the grinder of puberty as a beautiful swan or whatever. The glasses that made him a nerd through most of his school career apparently classified him as a “sexy geek” when he became a Junior, while his loner status meant he was just playing hard to get. 

Despite being almost the 21st Century, omegas were still stereotyped as horny little sluts who could only be tamed by the right alpha – so asshole alphas fought each other over who would be the one to do it while betas tried to get some “sweet omega tail” before an alpha took them off the market. Most omegas gave into the system, playing the field and pitting alphas against each other, or attaching themselves to an alpha who could act as a shield from the bullshit (though this was only fully effective if a bond occurred). But Jake was socially awkward and sexually shy, so he'd weathered the catcalls with an embarrassed blush, or wildly random off-the-cuff factoids (“Did you know that slugs fornicate by stabbing each other?”) for the ones who resorted to insulting him when he didn't respond to their tasteless come-ons. 

He told himself he'd be free of it soon, and told his sister everything was fine whenever she called to check on him. “Yeah, I haven't really gotten picked on since the growth spurt.” “No, I'm not seeing anyone.” “Yeah I'm still getting straight A's Jess, worry about your own school.” “NO Jess I do NOT need you to give me the talk okay, I'm still single and not interested in anyone anyway!” “Arrggh yes I KNOW you weren't trying to imply I need to have sex with anyone, can we please not talk about this ever ugh you're practically my mom I do not want to have this conversation with you.” He loved her to death, but hearing her talk about sex might just cause him to spontaneously combust. 

When he turned 18, the recruiter only looked mildly surprised when Jake marched into his office and laid out exactly what he wanted from the Army while tapping a pen impatiently on the Staff Sergeant's desk. His eagerness for the chance to get away from the claustrophobia of small town life and omega discrimination made him forget to call his sister until AFTER he did it. Still, he only felt the slightest pang of guilt when Jessica chewed him out loud enough that Jake thought all of New Hampshire probably heard her (“You could have gone to any school you wanted with your test scores you little shit!”), then made him swear not to get himself killed. Once he'd signed enough “William Jacob Jensen”s to make his hand cramp and gone through a thorough(ly invasive) physical, the Army doc approved him for a Deprogest prescription and he was officially cleared for Basic. Despite having just signed four (plus four) years of his life away, Jake felt like the chain of omega stigma hanging around his neck was being replaced by the barely noticeable weight of his new dog tags. 

Not that Jake was ashamed of being an omega, he was just FUCKING SICK of the assholes who got hung up on it like it was the only thing that defined who he was, including his drunk asshole of a father. Actually, it would be generous to say alpha Will Jensen cared that his son was an omega, because that would have implied he cared at all. Jessica was the one who had changed his diapers, fed him, dressed him, and read to him while their father attempted to drink his cares away. When Jake came home from school with a limp and caked with dirt after his omega pheremones had manifested, his father only wrinkled his nose and gave Jake a look of something like disdain before going back to watching television, and that was more recognition than Jake ever remembered getting before. But that was history as far as he was concerned; the Army was his rebirth. 

Thanks to his height and the muscle he put on during training, combined with his inability to stop talking, no one ever assumed he was an omega. While his rather dorky sense of humor, babbling, and occasional forgetfulness (he had an Eidetic memory, but his mind was always running on about 5 tracks at once) got him yelled at and plenty of correctional PT, his motivation and friendliness meant he got along well enough with his fellow trainees. Basic flew by and Jessica came to his graduation, crying into his immaculately pressed Army greens and telling him how proud she was of him, “even if you're an IDIOT.” 

He went home with her for a two week break before his advanced training and finally met Aaron, the beta she'd been seeing since her second semester at Dartmouth. Aaron at least had the decency to look like he was taking Jake seriously as he puffed himself up and gave the guy the shovel talk, so Jake decided he might be okay. He spent most of his break on the internet catching up on shit he'd missed in the last nine weeks (and maybe wreaking some minor havoc), and then it was off to AIT. 

It wasn't even close to the frenzied pace of Basic and lasted twice as long, so time seemed to slow to a crawl as he settled into a routine of PT, classes, and drills. There was also a lot more freedom, though Jensen casually turned down invites to go bar hopping with his classmates on the weekends (most of them, like him, were also still underage); he didn't want to end up like his dad, no matter how much he told himself he was nothing like the guy. There was also the fact he didn't feel ready to expose himself to situations with potentially sexual expectations. So he picked up unwanted fire duties for cash instead and let them think he was just a tightwad rather than someone who couldn't hold his liquor, or a clueless virgin. 

His first duty station at Ft. Mead had him going stir crazy within a few months, doing file management and tech troubleshooting that a monkey could handle, like helping paper-pushers reset their passwords every other day. He realized in retrospect that graduating at the top of his class in AIT meant he was scouted out by important people to be their own Private Monkey, and important people tended to sit behind desks far away from any kind of action. It was dull, dull, dull, and he was surrounded by more officers than enlisted, effectively leaving him socially isolated, once again; though, at least this time it wasn't for malicious reasons. Most of the officers were friendly enough, and some of them were even quite attractive and flirted with him (the kind of socially acceptable flirting between an older person and a younger person that presumably would never be followed up on due to the Army's fraternization policy), but overall he found himself missing the camaraderie and physicality of Basic, which fit better with his expectations for the Army. 

His sergeant didn't understand why he would want to leave “the Nation's Preeminent Center for Information, Intelligence, and Cyber Operations” (because that wasn't overblown at all), but after Jensen's first promotion, followed by his transfer window opening, she helped him apply to a Ranger unit, warning him not to get his hopes up. Jensen might have done a teensy bit of shuffling with some priority listing in said unit's systems. Possibly. But he probably deserved the spot more anyway. In preparation for Ranger school, he pushed his physical training well beyond what his sergeant required him to do and went to the range at every opportunity to get his marksmanship scores up. He didn't even have to fake his excitement when she told him his new orders were in, and yes he'd be leaving for Airborne training next month, followed by RASP. 

Airborne training was not so much “fuck yes I'm gonna get paid to go parachuting!” as a lot of running in full equipment, endless amounts of pull-ups, jumping from towers, and then finally “holy shit that ground is awfully close are you sure we shouldn't be doing this from a bit hiIIIIIIIIGHHERRRRR OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SWEET BABY JESUS HAHAHAHA,” followed by spectacular knee pain upon landing at a velocity only marginally slowed by the parachute. Of course, the knee pain wasn't serious. Most likely. I mean, he could still walk, even though he also seemed to have landed in a cactus and why the hell were there cacti in freakin' Georgia?? Well, it didn't detract from his elation at finally doing his first jump. His adrenaline was still making his heart beat as fast as it had been 1200 feet in the air and he was WIRED. He gasped and laughed and felt his eyes getting hot. Those were not tears, his eyes were just stinging from the wind rushing by at like a thousand miles an hour. His bunkmate, Specialist Alvarez, who had landed as gracefully as a cat a hundred yards away, just smirked as Jensen (not limping, thank you) made his way towards him so they could walk together to the pickup point. 

Jensen grinned widely at him and offered a fist to pound, “We did it, dude! I mean, specialist! Ranger school, here we come!” 

Alvarez just quirked an eyebrow and snorted very lightly before knocking his fist into Jensen's. “You do not have to call me by my rank, Jensen. It is not a very special rank.” 

Jensen blinked a few times before he burst out laughing,“Man, that was a terrible joke! Oh but seriously, you NAILED that landing, you were like a freakin' COUGAR or somethin' - the silent hunter pouncing on his prey!”Alvarez's eyebrow quirk intensified and Jensen swore he almost heard a chuckle. He tried to ignore the way his insides were doing little flip-flops, as he did every time Alvarez turned those intense brown eyes on him, like he was the aforementioned prey. He covered his sudden nervousness with a laugh and looked away, bouncing on his toes as they walked and turning on his superpower of Meaningless Conversation. Though conversations usually implied the other party was replying, Alvarez never seemed to mind, even grunted or made other vague sounds of acknowledgment while Jensen babbled. Like he was actually listening and maybe even found what Jensen was saying to be interesting, or entertaining at least. Alvarez didn't seem like the kind of guy to bother with such things if he wasn't, in fact, paying attention. 

When he first arrived at Ft. Benning, Jensen had gone a whole week without hearing Alvarez make a noise, outside of formational yeses and nos or barely audible Spanish as he prayed over his rosary. Even their first meeting, which usually meant exchanging niceties and introductions, was just Jensen introducing himself while the specialist gave him an unreadable look and then eyed the name on his uniform pointedly, as if to say “Yeah, I figured out your name was Jensen already.” He'd forged on valiantly while Alvarez folded his uniforms, then followed him out to formation, and still didn't get a word out of him. Jensen shrugged it off, figured maybe the guy was just antisocial, until he'd started being on the receiving end of that gaze more frequently. Then, during Tower Week, Alvarez had actually injected a comment into what Jensen was going on about, which shut him up for a good ten seconds while he processed that yes, he had in fact heard his mysterious bunkmate speak and yes, it had been directed at HIM. 

Jensen felt like they might actually be friends now, but he still didn't really know what to make of the older man. He knew he had someone close because he got mail and wrote letters regularly (and not being creepy at all Jensen might have found out his first name was Carlos after fishing an old envelope from the trash). He figured he was a pretty devout Catholic, because he attended mass and never took off his rosary - which made Jensen nervous in an entirely different way, of what Alvarez would think of him if he found out Jensen was an omega who was obviously on Deprogest. Still, that fear didn't outweigh the undeniable attraction he felt. The man's soft Spanish accent made his butterflies go mad, but he was positive it wasn't just because Alvarez was an alpha. His pheremones could be very distracting, but fortunately for Jensen he only smelled them before Alvarez took his morning shower, because nothing seemed to get him worked up enough to release them unconsciously, other than when he was asleep. But his voice was enough to make every whirring gear in Jensen's head grind to a halt, as if hearing him speak was more important than his own thoughts. 

It was his presence, his... Cougar-ness, which was all cool confidence without the brash swagger that many alphas had. The effect he had on Jensen frankly unnerved him a bit, made him feel not entirely in command of himself, and above all made him want something he couldn't even articulate. It frustrated the hell out of him, especially since he couldn't exactly broach the subject while they were there; even if it wouldn't have been wildly inappropriate to mention in the training environment, it wasn't like there was any privacy and he could easily alienate the only person he had really connected with in the Army. So he told himself to be patient and tried to squash his feelings down, file them away somewhere at the bottom of his priorities and just concentrate on doing what he'd come here to do, which was fall out of planes, not fall for unfairly handsome and inscrutable alphas.

**Author's Note:**

> So that's it for now, apologies in advance because I'm a slow writer but I would love to hear what you think of it so far :x erm as for the military stuff, I was in the Army but not a Ranger so some of this is just from my experience and some is from Google.  
> __________________________________
> 
> CO = Commanding Officer
> 
> XO = Executive Officer (second in command)
> 
> Enlisted = A person who goes into the army without an officer commission, usually starting at the rank of Private (though with JROTC or college ed you can start at a higher rank - PV2=private second class, PFC=private first class, or SPC). This also includes all sergeant ranks (NCOs=non-commissioned officers).
> 
> SPC = Specialist, the fourth and last rank before promotion to NCO rank of Corporal or Sergeant.
> 
> Basic = basic training, boot camp 
> 
> AIT = Advanced Individual Training, which is where you go after Basic to learn a Military Occupational Specialty (MOS); length and location of AIT depends on the MOS. I don't actually specify what Jensen is but it's probably 25B, an IT job, while Cougar is infantry (11B).
> 
> PT = Physical training, usually referring to the organized kind that soldiers do together under the instruction of a squad or platoon leader.
> 
> formation = when soldiers are organized into squads/platoons for formal things like roll call/announcements, movements, and drills.
> 
> fire duty = basically like watch duty for barracks? It's done in teams, one person sits in a specific post and the other roams. Length of shift depends on the post. 
> 
> SpecOps = Special Operations or Rangers are the combat elite of the Army, generally first deployed and also used in covert operations. Requires extra training beyond Basic/AIT including Airborne and RASP.
> 
> RASP = Ranger Assessment & Selection Program, which has two parts depending on your rank. The one Jensen & Cougar go through is RASP1, which is 8 weeks long and kind of like a super intense and more in-depth version of Basic.
> 
> SOP = standard operating procedure, the local regulations for a specific unit/post.


End file.
